Maurice Denis

At 20, Maurice Denis wrote a sentence that art students still memorise. Remember, he declared in 1890, that a picture, before being a warhorse, a nude woman or some story, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order. In one line the young painter had pointed toward everything abstract art would later do with a plain plane of colour.

Denis was a leader of the Nabis, a brotherhood of young French painters who took their name from the Hebrew word for prophets and treated painting as something close to a sacred calling. Their work is flat, patterned and decorative, full of quiet domestic scenes and glowing colour. Denis himself was a devout Catholic, and much of his life went into renewing religious art, which most modern painters had abandoned.

After the First World War he helped found the Ateliers d'Art Sacré, the Studios of Sacred Art, to bring living modern artists back into churches. He decorated many himself, in France and beyond. He died in 1943 in Paris after being struck by a truck, still at work on church commissions in his seventies.